Pop’s Mini-Mart, at the corner of King and Ocala on the eastside, is getting a facelift. But it isn’t just a cosmetic change; it’s the kind that can change the history and lives of a community that surrounds it. Frank “Poncho” Torres, an accomplished muralist whose work is all over the eastside, has steadily been crafting a masterpiece for the past seven months or so—a wall-sized mural that is a call to end gang violence and to locate this community in a larger cultural moment.
The mural was originally started as a memorial to a young man, 22-year-old Jerry Hernandez, who lost his life due to gang violence. But as he painted, Torres expanded the scope, and dedicated the piece to all the youths who have senselessly lost their lives to street violence. The mural, in terms of craft and message, is beautiful. Muralism, as a language, has a unique way of communicating themes and lessons. For example, alongside important historical figures in Latino culture, Torres also has painted a time capsule with an image of a mother inside. It is this notion, the concept of time and consequence, that eludes the impulsive action—the act of violence done in the heat of the moment.
But the real value of this mural is in the time, place, and process. As we head deeper into the summer, sitting on one of the highest violent crime eras the city has seen in decades, gang violence is brimming. The city, acknowledging the potential boiling point, has launched a Safe Summer Initiative, allocating roughly $300,000 to agencies and organizations to provide activities and opportunities for youth. Torres’s mural project, though, has not waited to do the same work.
Pop’s is located in one of the most gang impacted regions in the city. It is also where students cutting school from Overfelt High and Fischer Middle School go to. In terms of actual places where youths most impacted by gang violence willingly hang out, Pop’s is the spot. So as Torres transformed his wall, young people watched, helped, and even protected. Their respect for Torres and the mural is why Torres can leave paint equipment out there even when he is gone, and no one takes it. One young man who goes by the name “Mad” and was raised in that neighborhood, has been helping Torres regularly, and says the mural is going to have a lasting impact on young people growing up there. In his early twenties, he has become a sort of youth mentor with the high school students.
“Seeing the mural, it’s like the culture is finally being put up in that Tully area.” Mad says there are two main reasons why youths keep coming through to help Torres. “One is because they see themselves in him—he knows what they’re going through. And second, he’s always there.” Ultimately, it is these qualities—integrity and consistency—that the value of any program or solution to end street violence will ultimately need.
In explaining the escalation of gang violence, law enforcement experts often describe tipping point moments—certain incidents that light the rest of the city on fire. But what may also be possible is the opposite: singular actions, based on dedicated efforts, can act as agents of change that alter the homicide rate of a city. Like a mural on the side of a wall of a mini-mart.
Thank you for this awesome column. I’ll try and go by there this weekend. I’d love to see it. It is important for youth to feel they belong, that they are loved and cared for. They need adults to lean on and teach them about their heritage, to be proud of who they are and where they come from, and to live their lives the right way.
I was very blessed to have parents who taught me about my differing cultures. My Father was Irish, and my Mom was German. I really enjoyed learning about my roots. But what I loved most was learning that I belonged, and that I had family.
We weren’t wealthy by any means. My parents both worked hard for everything, and never handed us anything we didn’t work for. That gave my brothers, sisters and I a great sense of independence, and pride in ourselves for what we earned ourselves. It also taught us like Mr. Torres is teaching these kids, that life isn’t easy and that you must take pride in yourself and your community.
I saw a video called, “Be Kind Rewind.” It is a surprisingly good video about an African American elderly man who, like Mr. Torres, teaches youth, and his community some very important lessons about life, history, culture, and community. If you get a chance go rent it and watch it with a friend or family members. I think you’ll find it very heart warming in a weird sort of way!
I personally love murals. There’s a Payless Shoes (really exciting) on Story that has a great, colorful image on the side of the building. It really livens up the setting. It brings real life to former suburbia.
Four decades after our local government and the news media got into the ethnic culture business—stressing difference, offering excuses, and politicizing failure, Overfelt High School and its surrounds are plagued by latino gangs that were not there three decades ago. The demographics have hardly changed, and the economic situation is, if anything, improved, but the kids there have developed a newfound obsession with race, resentment, and the power of collective violence.
Good luck with that mural.
#4
Overfelt High School and its surrounds are plagued by latino gangs that were not there three decades ago.
Interesting history lesson. What has happened? I suspect there is no one answer, but, rather, a variety of things (social, economic, and environmental) working together have produced the mess currently in East San Jose.
From the Mercury News on 5/28/08.
“The first study to follow lead-exposed children from before birth into adulthood has shown that even relatively low levels of lead permanently damage the brain and are linked to higher numbers of arrests, particularly for violent crime.
Previous studies linking lead to such problems have used indirect measures of lead and criminality, and critics have argued that socioeconomic and other factors may be responsible for the observed effects.
But by measuring blood levels of lead before birth and during the first seven years of life, then correlating the levels with arrest records and brain size, Cincinnati researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that lead plays a major role in crime.”
http://www.reidhillview.com/SJM_Lead_Violent_052808.htm
One major thing that occurred in East San Jose 40 years ago was Santa Clara County built the Reid-Hillview Airport in the middle of East San Jose during the mid-to-late 1960s.
http://www.reidhillview.com/rhv_history.htm
General aviation fuel has 2 grams of lead per gallon, and the RHV aircraft have been continually polluting the air in East San Jose for over 40 years. Research has shown that up to 70% of inhaled lead particulates enter the blood stream. Additional research has shown that any amount of lead in the blood of fetuses, and children younger than 6 can result in permanent, measurable, cognitive impairment.
http://www.reidhillview.com/#lead
Now research is showing that the same lead in children can also result in violent, anti-social behavior.
Is RHV solely responsible for the condition of East San Jose? Of course not. There are a variety of issues at play here.
However, the evidence is more than overwhelming that RHV has played a negative role in the development of East San Jose over the last 40 years. And it will continue to negatively affect East San Jose as long as RHV remains open.
#3- Gil,
I am so sorry about your son. How is he now? My thoughts and prayers are with him and your family.
#4- Frustrated Finfan, part of what you said was, “the kids there have developed a newfound obsession with race, resentment, and the power of collective violence.”
Unfortunately that applies to more areas than just this one. There seems to be this growing attitude amongst youth that is very hateful, angry, and yes it is also collective. I just don’t understand where it comes from or why it is happening, but I agree with you that the media has a lot to do with it, as well as what our schools are teaching them.
I had a young man and his mom in a mediation that were contesting being fined for having a wild party, and for continued parking violations. They claimed it was racial, the HOA said it was pure violation of the Cc and Rs. When I asked the young man why he thought it was racially based, he said he had just graduated from college and had been studying race issues. He was sure that he was being harassed because of his color, not his behavior.
I was and still am just stunned by his reasoning. I don’t think the white attorney from a local non-profit who was representing them helped much either, since she maintained that race, not their blatant disregard for the Home Owners Rules was the problem. You see their non-profit depends on grant money and one large grant they receive requires them to do race cases. So, finding racial discrimination where there is none has now become very profitable. Sad but true.
I think what Mr. Torres is doing very important. It isn’t just about a mural, even though I do think they can be just beautiful. I think it is about getting kids involved, teaching them about themselves through history, through art, through doing a project as a team. It is time that we teach them something else like, self-love, self-respect, and community.
#5 Bud: Ah yes, Reid Hillview Airport is the source of various social problems troubling today’s youth.
I’ll bet if I wait here long enough someone will also blame illegal immigration, Chuck Reed or downtown redevelopment.
Violence is a learned responce! I went to East LA to photograph the hundreds of murals with my then 15 year old daughter.
Did the murals stop the violence, of course not. Does it make sense to punish a tagger at 16 and then send him to Iraq to die at 18?
My own only son was assulted by three thugs while visiting his sweetheart in Santa Teresa school district 15 years ago. The 15 year old white boy that did the stabbing, had been abused by his father. The boy tried to poison his father, and was sent to live with his mother here in San Jose.
My son was stabbed in the brain with a screw driver. Judge Ball gave the kid 18 months. He gave us a sentence of life with little hope of complete recovery. Every Day we change ourselves. Every day we grow to understand that a child must be loved and protected, some time even from himself or herself. We work hard and grow stronger each day. Ladoris Cordell became my son’s Gardian Angel. Her compassion and understanding was the difference in healing my family.
God allows each one of us to choose to forgive or to carry that pain. We have made a choice to forgive both the system and the henious thugs. Even now my son and I are canvasing the East side with awareness flyers on family’s responsibilities to their children. The fliers may be about protecting their children from the lead expousuer in the old units, to their rights to live a safe life, free from fear of abuse.
A woman named Micaela was the one that transformed Sal Si Puedes just a few years ago. An incredable story in it’s self. see allen wong vs. EPA.
It will take more than a mural to change the living conditions of the King and Story area. One big step was winning the good fight.
We’re so busy with the down town core, that we deny there are more immediate issues in our community.
We have been playing politics with our Village Children for so long we deny there is a problem yet we continue to increase the police presence in the down town core. Most recent heavy concentrations of police cruisers have been working the east side during the afternoons. Not unusual since Nora and the Mayor have been having their very public differences.
There is an oasis in the East side. The National Hispanic University. It’s students have mentoring instructors, that have given the students the confidence needed to defeat many of the most prestigous Universities in winning national debating contests, two years consequetively.
Certainly, if Dr. David Lopez and the fine supportive board can send disadvantaged children to far away places and win National debating contests, what of the Googles of this world. Are they willing to become part of the soluton right here at ground zero.
Become part of the solution and stop thinking that a mural will be the answer to what is is you are not doing about your Village.
The Village Black Smith and Son
So, did Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Frank Nitti, Ma Barker and her boys, Bonnie & Clyde, Jesse James, Tiburcio Vasquez, Mike Tyson, Jack The Ripper, and Geoffrey Daumer all grow up under Reid Hillview’s flight path, or eat lead paint as kids? No? So there must be some additional explanation besides lead exposure for anti-social behavior and the prevalence of gangs in certain neighborhoods.
#5 Bud,
Enough with Reid Hillview and Air Polution.
Time for that argument has come and gone.If you check the RHV records of flight take off`s and landings for the past ten years you will find that Reid Hillview`s time of usefullness has come and gone.The RHV airport is dead.It has become a home for a mothball fleet of private aircraft.
The reason to close it today is because it has lost its purpose or value.
I personally love murals. There’s a Payless Shoes (really exciting) on Story that has a great, colorful image on the side of the building. It really livens up the setting. It brings real life to former suburbia.
Im glad you enjoyed the mural on the side of Payless Shoestore located on Story Road. Frank “Pancho” Torres was responcible for that mural aswell. The Payless mural was another community project that Pancho did callaborating with another Artist back in the 80’s. The payless mural involves different shades of the Chicano struggle and speaks directlly to both the brightest and darkest sides of one’s soul. But I think the Pops’s mural is a little different. It’s been 20plus years since the Payless mural has been painted and the gang issue between North and South on the Eastside has since grown and has gotten more complicated. The Pop’s mural reflects the young lives of youth that have gathered there before there was a mural and will continue to gather there after the mural is finished. Two key schools are of walking distances, Fischer Middle School and Overfelt High School.
The mural will not stop gang warefare as a whole. The beef between North and South is far too deep and complicated ever to stop. Unlike the Crips and Bloods who are both pedominatly Afro-American and strickly street gangs and have maintained gang truces and peace zones down in Southern California. The beef between North and South are highly organized and have there roots in prison. On the the streets they involve a division between culture, self hate, laguage barrier and self defence. What the mural has potential in is to get youth involved in something positive in the community and becoming culturally and spiritually conscience instead of flat out gang banging.
Bud, there is an excellant site on lead and airports
“Lead effects at airports”.
If you live,work, hike etc. Down Town buy your self a negative resperator!Asap
#8 JMO, Most of the hoodlums you mentioned died from lead expouser. Lead kills, you know.
The next time you use a crystal stem wine glass. Get rid of the lead wrapper asap. drink fast. Lead crystal leachs into the wine if you sniff too long. Better yet leave the wine in the wine bottle
When did you ever hear of a guy at Henrys getting high bloodlead poisoning from drinking beer out of a bottle and a shot! Right! Never!
Here’s a DiCinzo inspired scene. A guy and his date are eating dinner down town out side and drinking wine out of crystal, the lead wrapper was left on the lip of the wine bottle. 50 police cars are all racing around town and most are in position just Idleing in groups. You got 3ooo cars cruising, and 50 flights into Mineta all practicly skimming the top of the the DeAnza. I’d say that’s 5 lead expouser strikes.
This is the adult version of what a baby goes thru. The problem the baby has, is his brain is still forming, while your is already formed and probably deforming from all the 747s exhaust, and lead wine wrappers etc just like the BABY’S Brain.
If all the tests are conclusive, and the foreign baby toys keep comming and the slum lords don’t clean up their units, in a few short years, we may need 1 cop for every 5 people, in the down town. I recommend all read site “Toxic Lead & Violence 05-Aug-2004”
The Village Black Smith
#12
Nice post. Why are you so ashamed to sign your own name, rather than forge mine? Could it be because your post is mostly fantasy with little basis in reality?
Bud, it’s time for all the people who use the Reid-Hillview Airport to start a campaign to bulldoze everything around it built since 1962 to make the area that surrounds the airport more like it was when the airport was first built and people first started going there; more rural and peaceful. I hate the fact that now when I drive to the airport I have to pass through so many traffic lights, have to experience so much urban congestion. When I first started using the airport I never signed on for any of that!
Never forget that nature was here well before any of the neighborhoods, and I bet mother nature is turning over in her grave every time an old piece of shit car passes over her dripping oil and blasting umpa-music. Get a grip, Bud, Mother Nature was here first, and the airport is far closer to her than are the people who decided to buy the cheap real estate around that airport and then bitch about their choices. The area around Reid-Hillview should be returned to its pristine natural state as it was for thousands of years before these neighborhoods were built. There is far more pollution from the 200,000 people living around the airport than the airport will ever produce in any of our lifetimes. The airport is a sanctuary for wildlife in the middle of streets full of madmen blasting around in their umpa-mobiles. And, if you think the sound of an airplane taking off is unacceptable, you should try riding your bicycle, like I do, from say Story/King to Tully and back over to Ocala. Far more pollution, both exhaust, and noise, and congestion, violence, etc. than you will ever experience at that airport. Try it some time, ride a bike around our neighborhood, then go onto the airport and walk around. The airport is a quiet sanctuary compared. Park-like. Get a grip, Bud, the airport is not the source of this neighborhood’s problems. Social problems happen even when there are no airplanes taking off. Believe it or not. If you hate the airport so much, then simply move away from it! I used to live next to a meth dealer, guess what, after a year of that crap that even the police couldn’t cope with, moving from that place was the single best and most stress-relieving thing I ever did. I highly recommend it if the airport is bugging you so much. Simple fact is, stand on the corner of Tully and King, or Story and White, or anywhere around here, and you will see what I mean. It got crowded, the fast growth of the area was not managed, and now everyone who lives here is paying the price for that. What if the airport were a golf course? Same acreage, same few people using it, same park-like setting, but look what happened to the municipal golf course up near White and Cunningham, closed years ago, the land could be used for some of the things you suggest the airport land gets used for, but sits vacant and overgrown. I agree the golf course should remain vacant and overgrown because it’s better that way than full of people crammed nine or ten into a two-three bedroom house. I’m not against poverty, I’ve spent most of my life with a negative net worth, and only very recently can say if I were fired tomorrow I could eat for a few months…so it’s not a rich/poor argument, or a I Was Here First argument, it’s about all our own personal choices. Choice to live near an airport that bugs us, choice to buy in the vicinity of an airport. The airport was established in the mid 1960s. Most of the property around it has changed hands since then. So most of the present owners made a choice based on cost vs. inconvenience of airport noise. Turns out the airport emits far less noise or pollution than it would if it were converted to condos. Sure, it’s 180 acres of land that only say several thousand people per year use to generate well over $10,000,000 per year, but it is also 180 acres of land that is kept preserved as mostly grass, trees, open spaces, ballparks, and no cars, noise, crime, violence as we see in equivalent 180 acre areas nearby. Kind of like an oasis that generates money. So, I hope you get your act together some day and just move to a neighborhood you are happy with. I myself enjoy the airport. It’s a welcome change of scenery from the streets full of houses around it, and it provides an interesting place to hang out that is not a mall, shopping center, or other retail/commercial destination. We have enough of the retail/commercial/advertisements in our lives anyway.
Mr. Torres just took a beating this week, because he was cleaning the mural, cause some kids sprayed it.
So much for that mural changing anything down there.What we need is to have some private security and no san jose police.
That will stop gang violence.
Pancho De la Villa